Dad is lying on his bed, half human and half ghost. He is not as pale as he was during his last bout with pneumonia, but he certainly looks ghost-like. His companion machine with its steady pulse is squirting oxygen into his nostrils with each breath. Dad is wearing pants in bed, a linen shirt and a felt shirt on top of that, despite the open door to the balcony letting in the warm moist Mid-Atlantic summer air outside. It doesn’t take much to make you cold when your body fat is gone. My father, who once towered six feet tall, was now diminished, and now weighs about 140 pounds.

He is lying flat because it is hurts less to lie, but also because standing takes work, which means using oxygen. Standing also requires muscles to move and right now it hurts to move his muscles. It probably hurts because he is not eating much, so to stay alive his body is looking for energy elsewhere and is busy converting the protein in his muscles into energy. All his muscles hurt, he tells me. Dad has the appetite of a bird, except that I suspect a bird eats more. A spoon or two of food makes him feel full, and then he wants to lie down. NPR news fills his bedroom while he lies, but mostly he is not listening. He sleeps a lot: all night and most of the day.

Frankly, there is little incentive for him to get out of bed. When he does he hurts and even with oxygen going into his nose it’s easy to feel winded. His left lung is still there but essentially it is non-functional as it is full of fibrous tissue. His stomach hurts a lot, particularly when standing. The good news is he can still stand. Dad can sort of take care of himself. In reality though he has lost a lot of his agility, so he needs someone to help him into clothes and out of clothes. He gets through the night by keeping a urinal next to his bed. Dad is not so much living as he is existing. His wife (my stepmother) provides companionship and helps in the nursing duties, that is until I arrived.

My father is scared but cannot seem to admit it, and depressed, which is something he will grudgingly admit. The Lexapro may help with the depression, but he just started taking it and it takes a few weeks to have an effect. The psychiatrist cannot see him until mid July. Dad needs lots of things, but mostly he needs to eat a whole lot more. It’s not clear if his stomach can process it.

What Dad needs even more is family and that’s why I made the four hundred mile journey to see him and spend four nights with him. I was there out of love and concern, but also because I am retired, so I can spare the time. He needs someone to listen with compassion. He needs someone who understands his whole person. I can do that, as he did the same with me many times growing up. I can hold his hand. I can make gentle suggestions. But mostly I listen. It’s pretty clear that Dad wants to leave his mortal coil. His way of doing so strikes me as passive aggressive: eat very little and spend much of his time in bed.

While he can walk, he walks haltingly. And he cannot walk too far and he walks somewhat unsteadily. When he gets out of his apartment he needs to be in a wheelchair, and generally that means Marie is pushing him. But at least for four nights it can be me. His oxygen bottle is slung from the back of the wheelchair. There is not much to look forward to in his condition, but there is at least dinner in the dining room of his retirement community, where almost everyone knows him by name. He looks diminished but when asked how he is doing he says “okay”.

It’s in the evening when something resembling life reemerges. He is energized around people and can maintain a conversation and at least for a while forget his pain. He eats little of what is on his plate, but takes sustenance from participating in the conversation around him. Returning home, with me there he will sit on the living room sofa and engage in conversation, but most of the time he hurts too much and wants to return to bed.

Getting him ready for bed is a time consuming and tedious process, which involves disrobing him, re-robing him, and cleaning him in between these states. It means assisting him with flossing and brushing and when not his shower day washing his chest, back and face. It means laying out clothes on chairs, shuffling shoes around and getting his urinal ready for night, all while tethered to a fifty-foot oxygen line. For me it means seeing his 88-year-old body so gaunt, with bones practically protruding from his skin and waiting to assist when he stands and sits. It means buttoning and unbuttoning shirts, helping him on with boxer shorts and pajamas. It means getting him a glass of water to use when brushing his teeth. It’s a ritual that varies little every night.

My presence means a lot but it is hard to quantify. On Friday I noticed him eating a little more and felt a bit cheered. I tried to be nonjudgmental as he tells me how he feels. I encourage siblings via email to call him and cheer him up. On Friday after dinner he goes to his desk and sifts through papers for a little while. This small act is actually a hopeful sign.

Fathers Day means company and phone calls, dinner provided by my sister and cookies provided by my nephew. It means love and companionship and, being my family, a discussion of contemporary politics in the living room where my conservative stepmother offers me reasons why she hates President Obama. My father mostly listens passively until I critique Fox News when he offers me a handshake. My Dad makes a point of being apolitical in front of the children, but occasionally a liberal viewpoint will leak out.

By Monday when I leave he is eating more. I encourage him to keep doing so. To start he needs enough calories not to lose any more weight, but his traditional passion foods like chocolate do little to engage him. I leave him with my stepmother who won’t coddle him and wonder if he will improve or regress again after I am gone. I can’t stay with him forever. I have a wife back in Massachusetts with chronic issues that also needs support.

There is always hope for a recovery, but realistically the best we can hope for is that he does not slide further. His pulmonary fibrosis won’t go away. He will be tethered to an oxygen container for the rest of his life. If things get much worse it will be more than my stepmother can handle. Nursing assistance will be needed and perhaps a nursing home. It’s not hard to predict that if he gets into a nursing home that he won’t live too long. He needs a social life to survive and there is none of that there.

Meanwhile, I hope that he will retain enough muscle mass not to fall, and I hope that some infection does not quickly fell him. He is doing far better (at least so far) than my mother did in her decline. Dying however slowly and incrementally is still an ugly process. Love and companionship help, but it’s not quite enough. He slips a bit further away from me with every passing day. It leaves me sad and melancholy.

Dying is not fair, but it must happen. There seem infinite paths for dying and my Dad seems to be choosing his way through it somewhat. All I can do is try to make things better, which may be giving Dad a sponge bath, holding his hand when he is low and letting him know how much I love him.

It’s that time of the month … for my review of the local Craigslist casual encounters section. When I say “local”, in this case “local” is Hartford, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive south from where I am living now. It’s the first sizeable metropolitan area near me now. If it’s not sizeable, the postings tend to be lame. I tried reviewing Hartford last month and found it quite promising.

I can count at least 194 web page views for this stuff in May, or about 11% of my total web traffic. Today at midweek looking at the first page of ads I find that as usual horny men are taking over the place:

41 men are looking for a man

42 men are looking for a woman

1 man is looking for multiple men

4 men are looking for a couple

2 guys are teaming up and are looking for one woman

2 transgender women are looking for a man

2 couples are looking for a couple

3 women looking for a man

Hopefully, Hartford won’t disappoint me in June. Let’s dig in:

Legitimate postings from women in this part of Craigslist are pretty rare. Here’s a 63-year-old woman looking for an endowed man to give him a blowjob. The only thing that piques my curiosity is how many men (probably much younger) are so horny they don’t care about her age. I’m betting it’s a lot but I’m not convinced the ad is legitimate.

Can a FWB (friend with benefits) also be a freak? That’s what this self-proclaimed big beautiful woman wants from her FWB. She doesn’t want just any freak, but a very well endowed black man who is freaky. She’s 44 but doesn’t want you if you are attached. Speaking for myself, the last thing I want in a friend is someone freaky.

Two female roommates are looking to “share” a well-endowed man, presumably at the same time. Curiously though they won’t host. What’s up with that?

She offers “sweet relief” but it sounds like she really offers especially intimate massages, all completely safe, so don’t expect kissing or penetration. I’d bring a lot of cash.

She offers even safer sex: naughty pictures by email of her 19-year-old coed body, but only for a fee, of course. She’s posted at least twice: here and here.

She is looking for officer material … literally. If you aren’t a police officer, don’t bother responding.

How respectful is a 59-year-old man posting as a woman so he can get you to read an ad where he says he wants to watch you masturbate to orgasm? Not very. Respect starts with being truthful, dude. Post this crap under m4w.

This is odd: a couple is looking for a well-endowed black man to see intimate pictures of his 45-year-old wife, but you will never meet. It all has to be done virtually. Why do their requirements matter? And why bother if this is your thing? You can see five intimate pictures of her posted in the ad and save yourself the hassle of contacting them.

This is odder: a couple is looking to get spanked by a man age 60 or older, but they are not looking for sex or inappropriate touching. A dirty old man can’t catch a break on Craigslist!

It’s not often that you can see what you will get in advance. Hartford has an art cinema and this couple is coming there to play on Saturday, and the wife will be very accommodating to all men that meet her criteria. Freshly showered and well-endowed guys should plan to be inside the Hartford Art cinema starting in the afternoon. They’ll be playing on both levels. She may be 51, but she can wash my car anytime. See photos.

This is a confusing ad: a man-woman couple is actually a dominant man and “she” is his slave boy, age 24. They are looking for you (a guy) to have “her” to degrade and do many other nasty things to “her”, but only safely.

He’s 55 and is looking for a man to “rim”. If you don’t know what that is, suffice to say you probably don’t want to know. He doesn’t want to reciprocate but you must be half his age or less. The main requirement is to have nice buns.

They are a couple. He wants her to squirt, but she doesn’t know how, so she needs a teacher. You (a woman) should come over and show her how it is done. My question: where do you get certified in this stuff?

Hair is good, the more the better according to this gay man who likes his men natural, including sporting an untrimmed beard.

Finally, an honest man: he’s simply looking for a “piece of meat”. I’d suggest a tube steak from the local Big Y.

Last but not least is this truly kinky ad from a woman looking for a man. Dildos and an open mouth are required. She’s in her late 30s.

In January, we saw The Imitation Game: the story of Nazi code breakers. Its principle character, Alan Turing, introduced the idea of the Turing test: a machine so sophisticated that when you interact with it you can’t tell it from a real human being. A lot of very wise people are quietly freaking out that we may be close to an era where we will be controlled by the machine. In Ex Machina we get to see what a machine that might pass the Turing test would look like and what it might mean. “She” is Ava (Alicia Vikander), the creation of mega billionaire Oscar Isaac (Nathan Bateman). Isaac created the next Google search engine and became so rich that he created a house and laboratory for himself so remote that even Verizon can’t reach it. Its location is unclear, but it appears to be in Alaska. One of Oscar’s employees, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to Oscar’s remote location to be the second person to meet Ava. At the end of the week he is supposed to make a judgment on whether Ava passes the Turing test.

Ava is pretty obviously a machine because much of her frame is transparent. The 26-year-old Caleb though quickly finds her mesmerizing, although they cannot touch each other. They interact through a glass partition. However, her programming is obviously top notch. Caleb has a hard time not thinking about her, although their daily sessions are relatively brief. While Ava seems real enough to him, there are some unexpected glitches in their laboratory. It suffers from occasional power outages. During this time Ava is unmonitored. Like Ava, Caleb is pretty much a prisoner in this weird estate. His keycard will get him into certain rooms and won’t allow him into other rooms. During power outages he is locked in his subterranean room. He talks daily with Oscar, who tries to be something of a distant buddy to him. Oscar may be a genius but he also has human frailties, including binge drinking.

This is a movie with hardly more than a handful of characters. It’s clear there is something else going on but it’s unclear what it is. Oscar is a bit of a control freak and Caleb is perhaps too intelligent for his own good. During power outages, Ava tells Caleb that she wants to escape from her room. Caleb eventually plots a way for them to escape together. I won’t spoil the ending but it does indicate if Ava passes the Turing test.

The movie is creepy without feeling like it is out of an Albert Hitchcock movie. Director Alex Garland’s greatest achievement might be the technical wizardry that shows that Ava is actually a machine. She is mesmerizing to watch with her blue tubes pulsating with artificial life. Yet she is not the only android on the premises. It’s unclear at first but Ava is but the latest version, and Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) who does the cooking is another one. In fact there are a whole lot of robot parts in the closet.

This is a tightly focused movie that should keep you engaged and curious. It’s not exactly Oscar material, but it is a good use of your time nonetheless. 3.2 out of four stars.

Rating:

Tomorrowland

I was expecting Tomorrowland to be a different movie than the one I watched. I was expecting this Disney movie to be saccharine, but it wasn’t. It starts out that way when twelve-year-old Frank Walker attends the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. The fair is pretty much Tomorrowland from Disney World, but Frank is there to impress the judges with his version of a jet backpack. Unfortunately it has some technical flaws, but he at least catches the eye of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a mesmerizing freckle-faced young girl who we will later learn is a robot.

Athena senses in Frank a wild-faced optimism, not atypical of its times. In the early 1960s our future looked a lot like The Jetsons, and it was mostly filled with well adjusted and happy white people. Tomorrowland is at least faithful to that naïve way of thinking. Following Athena while at the fair the young Frank stumbles briefly into a real Tomorrowland, or at least its slick representation.

Fast forward to the present. We are quickly introduced to Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), another incurable optimist in an age of climate change. She spends her evenings sneaking into the Kennedy Space Center to prevent a famous launch pad there from being disassembled. This helps keep her father (Tim McGraw) employed but everyone sees the writing on the wall for the pad and for the end of human spaceflight. Casey is like a somewhat older version of Athena: she is mesmerizing to look at and full of positive spirit. Being an optimist she believes that global climate change can be averted and that the future will look like something out of The Jetsons. This also makes her of interest to Athena, who surreptitiously provides her with a token from the 1964 World’s Fair that takes her to this future, at least while she is touching the coin. It works great when she isn’t running into walls or ending up in the muck. And apparently its battery is not an Eveready.

What Frank and Casey have in common is Athena. They are destined to intersect, but Frank has aged fifty years and now looks suspiciously like George Clooney. This Frank is a cynical one who understands the forces pitted against a happy future, and these include David Nix (Hugh Laurie), the leader of Tomorrowland. Nix’s Tomorrowland bears little resemblance to the slick advertising that a younger Frank and Casey encountered. In fact, human life is about to end very abruptly on the planet and its end is certain. Just watch the countdown clock.

With Casey’s arrival though, the probability of this happening mysteriously drops from 100 percent. Athena eventually connects Casey and Frank, and a series of improbable adventures starts that forms the heart of the movie. Can somehow at this late date the future be changed for the better? It will take a lot of optimists and the time is very late.

So Tomorrowland was a bit of a surprise, both for the quality of the acting and the slick way director Brad Bird puts it altogether. Somehow the lovely Disney optimism is woven around the truly depressing reality of what mankind is doing to its biosphere. It makes you want to click you heels three times and find yourself back in Kansas. The depressing reality is that we are already victims of climate change and it will only get worse. Still, while this movie entertains its real mission may be to introduce to mass audiences the very serious problem of climate change. And if it is to be fixed it will take the masses demanding action. Given our general inability as a species not to look much beyond tomorrow, I am not hopeful, but perhaps if we were filled with less adult cynicism it would be otherwise. At least Disney is doing its part in describing the magnitude of the problem, while likely reeling in profits for shareholders for doing so.

I think Uncle Walt would be proud of what his gang did some fifty years after his passing.

All my life I wanted to be a paid writer. Being a writer sounded quite glamorous. You are paid to create and if you were good enough or wrote for just the right mass audience you could be wealthy like Stephen King.

Life didn’t work out that way for me. It’s probably for the best because most writers are starving writers, which means they do it as a hobby and not for much real income. They have other jobs that pay the rent. Moreover most writing is not glamorous, even when it pays well. Most writers dream of writing popular fiction. What most writers actually do is write articles for magazines or trade journals, or the local newspaper. They adhere to editorial guidelines. Their writing is not very creative. It’s about putting a number of facts and quotations on paper or online in a way that may be interesting enough for the reader to make it to the end of the article. These days even publishers don’t care if readers read the entire article or not. They are looking to serve ads. They care about whether your article attracts a lot of ad views. Whether it gets read is not that important, unless they are going for some sort of award.

So if you can find a writing job it is likely to pay poorly and be demoralizing to you and your self-esteem. And if you do manage to get a book published, it’s likely to sell a hundred to a thousand copies, with extras ending up in a discount book bin or just shredded for pulp for the next book. For the vast majority of creative writers, writing does not provide close to a living wage. Most editors will refuse to acknowledge your brilliance.

Recently though I did get paid to write. I was paid to ghostwrite. So in a sense I have become a published writer, although I think the content is going strictly online. Essentially, I’m being paid to influence Google’s search engine. Yes, I am writing for a set of algorithms! I’ve become something of a slave to the computer!

Google of course is the king of search engines. Getting high or higher on its search index is important. For many businesses it’s the difference between life or death. The only question is: how to get ranked higher than your competitors? Google is not telling, although it does give some hints. Needless to say there are plenty of companies out there that claim they can get your company ranked higher.

Most of these outfits are selling snake oil. There are lots of obvious things that can be done which don’t hurt, such as having URLs with meaningful information about your article, providing a sitemap.xml file and removing bad links. In the trade this is called “search engine optimization” or SEO. Everyone with the means to do so is already doing SEO. What you really want is for your company to appear in the top page of Google’s listing, ideally at or near the top for a given search phrase. These are links that people will click on.

One of my clients has made a business of SEO. I’ll call him Dick (not his real name). He’s hired me for odd jobs maintaining his forum, generally because he’s too busy making real money to mess with it. Dick has a reputation in the SEO world of getting results. That’s why Dick sought me out to be a ghostwriter.

Dick’s success has come through building a company’s online reputation. He figured out that Google ranks higher those sites that publish honest articles. I have no idea how Google assigns an honesty rating to an article, but somehow it’s got a built in bullshit detector in its algorithms. If it doesn’t look like bullshit, it’s ranked higher. If it looks authoritative, it’s ranked even higher. If you publish lots of articles that look honest and impartial, over time it will raise the ranking of your company in Google’s search index. This is a long-term strategy and it’s a costly one as well.

So I was hired to write some technical articles in this client’s particular domain. It turns out I have pretty good credentials. First, I do information technology for a living, so I have practical and current experience along with a masters degree in software systems engineering. Second, I write fairly well. Third, I am mostly retired. And fourth, I can write an impartial article. My years in government have actually helped. Government employees develop finely honed bullshit detectors, because we are constantly dealing with vendors trying to get their products and services into our enterprise.

Dick is also kind enough to provide a few sample articles for my topic. I use these as well as my thirty years in the business to crank out these articles. Generally they are no more than 800 words and follow a format. I charge by the hour. Since most of these are survey articles, I don’t have to really do any research. I just start writing. It takes me about three hours to write an article. I bill at $30/hour (my retiree rate). So far I’ve done two articles and earned $180 ghostwriting. There will probably be more, as the client is satisfied with my work.

I have no idea where these articles will be placed, but Dick tries to get them in online publications of authoritative sites. I could probably find them online if I looked. Dick does edit what I send him, so it may appear somewhat altered. But at least I am a published writer. Some people may find my articles interesting, but the only “person” of real interest is Google’s search engine. We are basically trying to fake it out. Dick’s client is essentially renting my experience for potential future customers and an improved reputation.

I’ll probably never know how this will all pan out. Some part of me thinks I am being dishonest. I am writing honest articles, but I am doing it on behalf of a company that doesn’t have the in-house skills or the time to do it. They are essentially renting my reputation, such as it is, to add to their reputation.

But hey, at least I am a published writer now! My pseudonym? Call me Anonymous.

You need quite a long scorecard to keep track of the people running for president these days. As in 2012, the number is disproportionately high on the Republican side. This time around the number of Republicans running is even higher. As of today there are eleven officially declared candidates: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry and Jeb Bush. Unannounced candidates will likely include Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and John Kasich. Fox News and CNN get to figure out how to put them all on a debate stage. As a practical matter they should have two or three debates with subsets of the candidates at each. That way at least there is some chance of a debate.

But will any of them say anything that truly distinguished them from the other candidates? With the exceptions of Rand Paul (who recently tried to kill the Patriot Act) and George Pataki (a suspiciously moderate former governor of New York state) the answer is pretty much “no”. The rest are all cut from the same cloth; they accept the same orthodoxy and thus all kind of blend into the debate stage together. Some are slightly more socially conservative than others, but even Republicans will have a hard time finding any meaningful differences between them.

Some of these candidates could at least be laughed off the stage as simply not credible or for suffering from terminal foot in mouth disease. It appears that shame is no barrier to running for president:

Ben Carson opined that prison makes men gay, as if being a victim of rape in prison makes someone gay. He also said that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen since slavery. Presumably it is worse than two world wars and the Holocaust.

Mike Huckabee, referencing Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner, says it would have been convenient to pretend to be a woman when he was growing up so he could have gone into the women’s showers.

Rick Santorum, supposedly a devout Catholic, said the pope should shut up about climate change because he’s not a scientist, presumably ignorant that the pope worked as a chemist before joining the priesthood.

So far at least Democratic candidates haven’t suffered much from this problem. Hillary Clinton has learned the hazards of opening her mouth to the press from past campaigns and largely ignores them with listening tours. The closest crazy candidate is not the “Democratic socialist” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, whose opinions are actually mainstream. No, it’s Lincoln Chafee, former Rhode Island senator, governor and Republican whose announcement the other day at least managed to draw some attention for some controversial opinions. These included proposals that we should negotiate with the Islamic State and that we should embrace the metric system. (Those of us who remember the 1970s remember how popular moving to the metric system made politicians.) Martin O’Malley is running to Hillary’s left. The exception, if he decides to run, is Jim Webb, the only candidate in either party that could be considered a genuine moderate.

How all this will play out at this time is anyone’s guess. Republican candidates figure they can increase their odds of success with affiliated PACs stuffed full of cash, or by quietly getting the endorsement of well funded billionaires like the Koch Brothers or Sheldon Adelson. At the other end is Bernie Sanders, whose campaign is funded through lots of small donations, principally from committed liberal activists. While the effect of money on campaigns will doubtless be an issue in the campaign, every candidate will be doing their best to rake in obscenely large campaign contributions, if they can get them.

Eventually though one or more candidates has to break through somehow. Hillary Clinton arguably has already broken through with her wide name recognition and her wide approval among women of all parties. On the Republican side it’s much less clear who will break through. One strategy is to see who can hold on the longest and generally that means the candidate with the most money, i.e. the Jeb Bush strategy. Occasionally a distinct personality will emerge that tickles Republicans. All bets though are off on who this will be. Already sure things (Chris Christie and Jeb Bush) look like has beens. Last time Mitt Romney won in part because he looked like he could bring in non-Republicans. Fewer Republicans are willing to try what they see as a failed strategy. If I had to place my money on a Republican candidate right now, I’d probably go with Scott Walker, who’s not even announced yet.

The general election dynamics are in great flush as well, with much riding on who wins the nomination and the extent to which they excite both their base and moderates. Obama won in 2008 because he was seen as very different and thus exciting. Hillary won’t seem at all fresh but she can draw excitement from women, who comprise a majority of voters anyhow. If so 2016 could be a wave election favoring Democrats. Lacking a wave election much will depend on how enthusiastic voters are in general. Also voter disenfranchisement is a considerable factor and will tend to tilt things toward Republican states where it exists.

What’s unknown is what the sleeper issues, if any, will be. Bernie Sanders seems to speak for a lot of people. He is dragging the Democratic Party in general to the left, which could be dangerous in a general election. But many of his issues are issues most Americans feel strongly about but candidates aren’t seriously addressing, such as a living wage. If voter apathy can be harvested, the political dynamics might move sharply toward the left, at least in the Senate and in presidential races. Gerrymandering has made it unlikely that Democrats can regain the house before 2022.

So who eventually wins really depends on whom we choose to focus on and why. Will we choose to be dazzled by showmanship and money, or will we vote based on common values? Few candidates are speaking to the political moderates. The candidate that can do this and win their party’s nomination is the one likeliest to be our next president.

Dear old Dad is dying. It’s been an inference most of us have made based on his condition, which has been slowly but steadily worsening. Yesterday it became more explicit in his email to us. Dad’s left lung basically doesn’t work anymore. In his case it is due to a condition called pulmonary fibrosis. With just the right one working, he doesn’t get as much oxygen as he used to. Consequently he is frequently tired. He now joins a dubious but rather large club at his retirement community of men getting supplemental oxygen. His wife (my stepmother) now gets to wheel him to and from the dining rooms for his evening meals.

That’s not the half of it. He’s lost weight and is continuing to lose weight. For a man that was once six feet tall, he is down to 146 pounds. He looks gaunt. He has little appetite. In fact, his stomach hurts most of the time. It hurts more when standing and less when lying down.

When we saw him last toward the end of April he could walk unassisted. He can still walk but of course it will tire him so it’s not a great idea for him to do too much of it. He could also engage in conversation, although my stepmother was the more articulate of the pair. That he can still type an email means he retains motor skills.

If you have to die he is doing it pretty well. He is still at home, which is his apartment in his retirement community. He may be able to avoid assisted living altogether before he goes. How much longer he has is a mystery, but his time is likely in months, if not weeks. He has clearly given up trying to prolong his life. At 88, his body is simply wearing out. Even if he had extraordinary surgery like a lung transplant, he is very susceptible to infection. Visiting his dying sister last year involved flying cross country, which meant he caught pneumonia somewhere across the country at 35,000 feet. He informed us last month that he won’t be coming to a planned family vacation in July. His driving days are likely over. Unless he needs to see a specialist or go to the hospital, he’ll probably remain inside his retirement community until he dies.

Dad is pragmatic about death. In a retirement community, death is hardly a stranger. It is all around you. It is simply a matter of wondering when your number will be called. The community mailboxes have new death notices posted nearby pretty much every day. People drop out of your life rather mysteriously. It usually means they have passed on but didn’t want to make a fuss over it. You either accept death pragmatically or you let it rule you. My Dad has opted for the former.

His will has long been in order, along with end of life directives. He tries not to look too far ahead and take each day as it comes. He is gracious in his decline and grateful for his life. He realizes his dying could be much worse. He probably won’t lose his motor skills, like my mother did. He probably won’t end up in a nursing home, except possibly at the very end. If he needs hospice there is a good chance it could be done in their apartment. He could die in his bed, which is probably how he would prefer to go, the same bed (moved many times) that he and my mother inhabited over their fifty plus year marriage.

It probably won’t be the pulmonary fibrosis that kills him. Most likely he will succumb to some sort of virus or infection. In the end it was not the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy that killed my mother ten years ago, but a common bladder infection that she could not fight off. At this stage of life, what once you could fight off now is more likely to kill your overwhelmed body. His last bout with pneumonia required a hospitalization, but he survived it. Another one would likely kill him.

Still, he is grateful. He is grateful for his long and mostly healthy life. He is grateful for all of his eight children who turned out to be all good eggs. He is grateful for my mother and grateful to find a new partner in marriage late in life. He is grateful for having his wits together, being able to speak, being able to think clearly and being able to participate in much of what makes life enjoyable. He has lived a long life but he senses his end is not too far away. He neither wants to postpone it nor accelerate its end. He is tired of fighting what he cannot change. He is dying and he is content to die when he is called.

I can’t speak for all of his children but in general we are content to let him go in his own way and his own time. Of course it saddens us that he is dying and of course we will grieve when he is gone, and probably a lot before then too. But he has lived a long and rich life. He has done all those things that good people are supposed to do and much more. While my mother was dying, when he wasn’t caring for her he was tutoring one of the staff in the nursing home in math. Until very recently he ushered at church. He gave generously of his limited treasure. He loves us all and treated us all with kindness and respect, which we returned. He retains a serene confidence in his Catholic faith and his belief that he will be in heaven soon. His issues are not so much dying, which is inevitable, but day to day issues. Like most aging men he has an enlarged prostate. He needs convenient and frequent access to a bathroom.

Still, it is hard not to feel some grief as he declines. Some parts of him simply are no longer there. He took enormous comfort in food. Chocolate cakes used to be his passion. Chocolate anything was largely unsafe in his house. With so little appetite, chocolate is no longer a passion. He most likely has eaten his last slice of chocolate cake. He hasn’t the interest or the appetite for it.

I’ve urged my siblings to go see him and tell him what he has meant in their lives, although I think he already knows. I need to see him again soon too. Now that I live in New England it is not as easy, but I can probably drive down monthly to spend time with him. It’s unclear to me how much handholding he needs. It may be that I simply need to hold his hand a few more times. He is serene in his decline and accepting of it, seemingly without apprehension, taking one day at a time and eking out whatever remaining joy it will offer him in the time he has left.

Now that I’ve moved I’ve considered giving up monthly reviews of the local Craigslist Casual Encounters section. But my web statistics keep telling me to persevere. These posts remain popular for my small blog: 206 hits in the last 30 days, 218 hits for April, about 12% of my total hits. And that’s just the web traffic, and only the top ten pages with “Craigslist” in the title of the post. Add in syndicated traffic and my email subscribers and the number is doubtless higher.

Where I’m living now (Western Massachusetts) these postings are too lame to share. Springfield is fifteen miles away from me. It is Massachusetts’s third largest city with 700,000 people in the greater area. But it doesn’t warrant its own Craigslist section. So if I’m going to look for weird casual encounter postings, I either need to stop or broaden my range of “local”.

Aside from city of Springfield, the nearest largest cities are Hartford, Connecticut; Albany, New York; and Boston. Boston’s Craigslist includes most of the eastern part of Massachusetts including Worchester. Hartford is practically in spitting distance from Springfield. Its greater metropolitan area has about 1.2 million people, which makes it comparable to the Northern Virginia region that I used to scan. So it will do. But will it have the same bizarre flavor as Northern Virginia’s Craigslist section? Or are people less kinky in Greater Hartford? Let’s sample postings on this Wednesday night to find out.

This sexy black man with quite a bit to spare between the legs could have his choice of women into “larger” men, but for some reason is posting for a “tranny” instead. Whatever floats your boat, dude.

In Northern Virginia it wasn’t hard to find groups of heterosexual guys looking to gangbang one or more women. There is little evidence so far that there are groups of guys like this in Hartford, but there is at least this dynamic duo, age 30 from Newington.

Oh my goodness! There are scam artists on Craigslist! Who would have thought? Off Pascal Lane in Manchester is this “woman” (see her picture) who is actually a passable transvestite with a secret boyfriend in the back. Meet her and rather than get sex her boyfriend will rob you. At least this poster was kind enough to warn fellow casual encounters readers. Let’s hope this deters a few of these many highly hormone-infused men.

In fact there are plenty of women who are using Craigslist to pay a few bills, and then some. Yes, shockingly there are whores in this area of Craigslist. Of course, this is not news to regular readers of this area, and when looking at W4M posts they are easy to find. Some get missed but are easy to spot if you read between the lines:

She’s 24, a BBW (big beautiful woman) and wants to spend quality time with you but only if you are not cheap

She’s not technically a whore as you won’t get any sex, but she is “trying to make ends meet” and will send you “private pictures” presumably only if you meet her ends, but not meet in her end

He’s stuck at an airport hotel. His idea of successfully getting unstuck is to stick something very personal of his into you (a woman). He wants to know if any women are intrigued enough to come to his hotel, but most likely a woman won’t even read his ad. I suggest the hotel’s bar, if it has one, for his cruising ground tonight. This guy from Enfield is also at a hotel and feeling frisky, so feel free to shop around ladies! Ask if there are free chocolate chip cookies at the hotel’s front desk.

Why are women having so much trouble finding age 60+ men for sex? My guess it is the generally high incidence of erectile dysfunction in this group caused by the lower testosterone levels of older men in general. Anyhow, this woman from Middlesex County is pissed about it and will give you a piece of her mind because she says she’s legit. She may actually be this poster too. She’s available near Dartmouth Crossing and is usually available between 9 AM and 1 PM. Perhaps the local Red Roof Inn has convenient hourly rates and a senior citizen discount.

Attention clueless Craigslist men: here are some signs that a posting from a woman might not be legit. She has the same URL plastered three times over her picture. Her ad title says she’s looking for “skaters” and “bbc” but her ad doesn’t mention either of these. Of course she looks very young and hot. How is this happening? Some scammers are picking erotic pictures off the Internet, embedding their adult site in the picture and wrapping them around a simple program that spits out lurid titles and one line “sentences” with no punctuation then posts them probably using an automated process. There are dozens of these a day that look similar, usually with no location attached because a spammer can’t be bothered to take time to find the names of cities near where they are targeting. Enlightened yet?

Women embed their phone numbers in these ads all the time. These women are hookers and their ads are quickly flagged. It is unusual to see a guy looking for a gal adapt the same strategy, but this 54-year-old dude seems to want mostly to cuddle and have conversation.

Apparently Hartford has an “art” cinema. You don’t find many of these anymore. They used to be called adult theaters, in those days before X rated videos became widely available. Now it’s all the porn you can want for free on the Internet. Anyhow apparently the Hartford Art Cinema is one of these theaters still catering to the raincoat crowd. Based on this review on Reddit, it sounds like a pretty disgusting theater, but apparently at least occasionally consenting adults do naughty things in semi-public there. It sounds like a place where dirty old men and dirty middle aged men can hang out. When not surreptitiously masturbating on a good day maybe a couple like this one will come in and provide a show, and maybe more.

Ladies: if you want to see a guy jerk off, this 50-year-old guy is happy to oblige. Here’s another guy with a simpler proposition: you want to get high? If you want to get high badly enough, you won’t care that he’s 39 and married.

Most men looking for women in this section of Craigslist know it’s a waste of time. If you are going to post this type of ad anyhow, be specific. Ask for women with pigtails and sneakers, like this 36-year-old man from Hartford.

More next month, maybe. Hartford looks promising for this sort of entertainment.

There is no question about it: Massachusetts is lovely in the spring. Many areas can say the same thing, of course. Moving further north has reminded me of what I gave up when I moved to the Mid Atlantic. One thing was the lilac bush. Make that a million lilac bushes. There was the occasional lilac bush in my old neighborhood, but they are native here in the north, they are everywhere and whether you like it or not they heavily perfume the air for several weeks. If you don’t like their smell you either have to tolerate it or stay indoors.

And speaking of indoors, here in Western Massachusetts you can be indoors and outdoors at the same time. That’s because most of the time in the spring and summer you can and should open the windows for most of the day. And if you do, this time of year you will smell lilacs. Most of the time there is a gentle wind blowing, usually from the northwest. It is a healthy air, not air pumped full of sulfur dioxide and other nasty chemicals typical of the Midwest power plants that blew air toward my old neighborhood. It’s largely clean, pure and invigorating.

It’s beginning to occur to me that my old environment shaped the man I am. Mostly I shuttled in a car from place to place, from one indoor environment to another. Now most of the time the windows are open, at least a crack. It is like infinite lungfuls of health are continuously surging through our home. I am naturally happier because my environment is more attuned to what is natural for me. So far there have been no ozone days to worry about. With little in the way of automobile congestion or carbon emitting power plants, when it does get hot it feels more tolerable.

And it has gotten hot around here, well, at least very warm. We approached 90 one day, and had one uncomfortable week when temperatures ascended into the high 80s most days. We turned on the window air conditioner in our apartment to find it wasn’t really cooling. Fortunately the landlord replaced it the following day. If we use the air conditioner, it tends to be later in the day. Usually by sundown it has cooled enough to reopen the windows, and usually there is a breeze to let in.

Yes, environment does shape who you are. That’s clear to me. The Washington D.C. region was hyper-kinetic, traffic clogged and overly educated. I became somewhat hyper-kinetic and overly educated just to keep up with the Joneses. Here in Easthampton, Massachusetts its much more laid back. I haven’t encountered an angry person yet. This is not Boston. People here are pleasant, nice and friendly but not plastic. For the most part they are simple but good people simply enjoying this ride called life.

Their friendliness is natural but somehow I feel somewhat reticent to accept it. Our second Sunday we made an appearance at the local Unitarian Universalist church and we overwhelmed with their graciousness and friendliness. Even before the service started we were introduced to two sets of future neighbors from our soon to be 55+ community. We got to know them better in the social hour after service. Within a day we were on the community’s mailing list, and invitations started coming in. With all residents 55+, they are mostly retired or partially retired. They have plenty of time on their hands. So perhaps that explained their seemingly excessive curiosity about us. We don’t actually live in our new 55+ community yet because our house is under construction. But after attending several community events, it’s like we are already living there. With about forty houses everyone knows everyone else and everyone knows our name: we have an instant set of new friends. There is a book club for the women that my wife attended. There is a guy’s night out while women are attending the book club. There I got to meet many of the men in the community around a big table at Roberto’s, a local pizza place. There is even a knitting group that my wife went to; similar to the one she used to attend. Most recently there was a wine tasting event that we attended. Strangely I won the competition although I don’t have much of a wine palate. The bottle of Pinot Noir that I won will come in handy when we officially move in and we invite the neighbors over for a house warming.

If only we could move in, but it still looks like it won’t be for a few months. I biked up to the neighborhood in Florence today on the excuse to get our mail (we’re having mail sent there). There are little else but clean bike trails between here and there, trails that are often covered under a canopy of green leaves. Our soon to be next door neighbors greeted me by name by the mail kiosk. They know us better than we know them. It will take time to associate all their faces with names.

In the meantime I’ve been invited to join their biking club, which includes regular bike trips to Westhampton for bagels and breakfast. Our house to be is mostly a shell, but the outer walls are up and the roof is on. Most recently the electrical wiring was roughed into place, but largely construction is not going as quickly as we would like. Our very small apartment here in Easthampton is feeling claustrophobic. As much as my wife and I love each other, we are seeing too much of each other. The place is too small to have friends over. The kitchen seats only two, and there is no dining room. We want our house finished, our house on the hill, overlooking a park with Mount Tom framing the south. We want our stuff out of storage and a couple of new cats wandering around it to make it home.

Meanwhile I have consulting and programming projects to keep me busy. I am often on the bike trails, averaging fifteen miles or so per trip. Easthampton is not without its charms or its amenities. My wife has become attached to its Tasty Top ice cream stand. We are both discovering the charms of downtown Northampton, including its library, the Tuesday Farmers Market and its lovely downtown. (The library includes probably the smallest presidential library ever: the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library. President Coolidge was a former resident and mayor of Northampton.) Its downtown includes two stores of note: Thornes Marketplace (a sort of mini-mall) and Faces (a very eclectic store with mostly funny and offbeat items). Chain stores are few around here but there are many restaurants of superior quality and diversity. Most businesses are independently owned, and at least in downtown Northampton they all seem to be prospering.

Our first winter here will perhaps expose an ugly side to this area. Overall it remains lovely, charming, pleasant and friendly. It will take a few years to have informed opinions about our new neighborhood and our neighbors. Right now it satisfies our need for a quieter lifestyle, some city amenities, the best parts of New England, and a feeling of closeness to nature.

There are so many testosterone-laden movies out there to choose from that a pure women’s film is something of a rarity in the cinema. Pitch Perfect (2012) and Pitch Perfect 2 now in theaters drip with the estrogen. No fan of testosterone movies myself I thought I might go for these dedicated chick flicks. Maybe they would have more substance than the vapid stories in your typical shoot-em-up and car crash movies. Two movies about college women bonding in a women-only a cappella group should certainly scratch my itch for rich and meaningful relationship movies.

In truth, I didn’t seek out these movies. I have seen snippets of Pitch Perfect these last few years, mostly over my wife’s shoulders because she is obsessed with the movie. Naturally she wanted to see Pitch Perfect 2 the week it came out. So before I accompanied her to see the sequel this week I sat down with her to see the first movie in its entirety.

Both films center on Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick), a slinky but introverted woman with a passion for creating mix up tapes. In the first film she is a freshman (freshwoman?) at the fictional Barden University. She ends up with the perfect roommate, who is as distant as she is. Attending class doesn’t seem to be a priority for her. Both films don’t even mention majors, professors or classes. Her father works at the university and is something of a hovering presence, at least in the first movie. Beca knows it’s past time for her to connect with her gender, which doesn’t come naturally to her. She does half-heartedly try out for the Barden Bellas. (Those in an a cappella group sing together and use voice only. Songs and dance acts are interwoven, and part of its art is to imitate instruments using only the human voice.) The Bellas, in its most recent incarnation, are having a hard time getting traction in this world. Perhaps it is in part due to its dictatorial leader Aubrey (Anna Camp), size zero or smaller, who seems intent to drive all the girls on the team nuts with her obsessive-controlling behavior.

This group of Bellas consists of a fairly unusual group of women including Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), Stacie (Alexis Knapp) their black Bella and lesbian and Chloe (Brittany Snow) as the dreamboat redhead men like me fantasize about. So naturally bonding is a bit difficult, which is good if you are doing a chick flick because the whole point of the movie is to explore the ways they bond, and the permutations of their characters and interactions. It does this while subjecting the young women to “riff offs”(informal competitions between a cappella groups) and of course regional a cappella contests.

Both movies try to overlay these relationships with comedy and heavy sarcasm. Comedy is in the eye and ear of the beholder. To this beholder, the comedic aspects often failed and were often quite gross. In the first movie we quickly discover that Aubrey has the dubious ability to involuntarily projectile vomit at inconvenient times. This is the source of a lot of its “humor”. It had my wife laughing, but I just thought it was gross. And at size zero, there is no way she could projectile vomit quite so much. In the sequel the humor orients around Fat Amy, whose Miley Cyrus imitation on stage manages to expose her private parts to an audience that includes President Obama. At least there is no more projectile vomiting in the second movie. As for the sarcasm, the co-producer Elizabeth Banks also acts as one of the color commentators. She and her co-host John Smith (John Michael Higgins) put on quite a show themselves with their commenting, with their sarcastic and obscene opinions. It’s like they are doing an a cappella version of a Howard Stern show. Funny? Not for me, but it seemed to work with the female crowd.

These relationships often seem overly scripted and superficial; the characters are somewhat cardboard-ish. At times these movies are sweet, and sometimes the humor does work. As one or more very important competitions provide the frame of a plot for both movies, it’s hard not to root for these women. It’s not hard to predict that despite many wardrobe or digestive problems, these women will triumph in the end.

There is romantic tension of a lite variety between a male in an a cappella group at Barden, the Treblemakers and Beca. It can’t quite seem to blossom into love, but includes plenty of understated romantic tension, but at least Fat Amy attracts a quality suitor in the second movie. In the second movie Jesse and Becca’s relationship deepens somewhat but still feels more like a relationship out of a Disney animated movie than a plausible one.

Both movies reminded me that most movies are made principally to grab a few quick bucks. That seems to be the case with these movies. This is not high art. It’s arguably not art at all. There will be no Academy Award nominations for this sequel. It feels more like a female version of Animal House than the rich relationship movie I was expecting. But it’s at least good enough to make you care about the Bellas a bit, at least until they win their contests.

In general though there is not much here for the most men to enjoy, aside from a lot of mostly skinny and gorgeous young women and some light humor. Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2 are both reasonably amusing movies. However, I suspect many men who sit through this movie will do so sitting on their hands, or looking for an excuse for a potty break. It’s a hard movie for most guys to relate to. Not having grown up a female, I can’t say the same for women. Its financial success for its relatively modest budget indicates both movies succeeded in their goals of titillating and amusing a lot of women.

I can only give them a 3.0 (my B movie rating) because the singing and dancing make up for a lot of mistakes. The puking in the first movie and the crotchless scene in the second movie were both big directorial mistakes that the singing and dancing partially but not fully mend.

Wisconsin is the latest state to enact a so-called “right to work” law. With this law exactly half of the states are now right to work states. If your state is a right to work state, this means that you cannot be required to join a union as a condition for taking a job. If collective bargaining exists at a job site, the union can still negotiate benefits for you. You just have the right not to pay them union dues.

The effects on employees in these states are easily documented. In general you will earn less for the same job than in a state with no such laws. Unsurprisingly, this is because it is harder for a union to win the right to negotiate wages and benefits when they have fewer resources (union dues) to do it with. If paying union dues bothers you, there is an alternative: don’t take a job in the first place. If you think union dues are too high, as a union member you can petition for changes. Like any union (such as a credit union) a labor union is owned by its members. A union can disband itself if its members feel it is ineffective or if its dues are too onerous.

The supposed rationalization for right to work laws is that you as an employee should not have to pay from your wages fees that you do not want to pay. However, we are already required to have withheld from our wages federal income taxes, state income taxes, often city income taxes, pension contributions, Social Security and Medicare taxes. We can’t opt out of these. In many states other things are automatically withheld unless you explicitly opt out, such as your contribution to a 401-K retirement fund.

What if anything does all this have with a “right to work”? The theory seems to be that paying union dues by itself might be the difference between having a job that pays a wage you can live on and one you cannot live on. This is at best a dubious proposition, since you would be hard pressed to find a service-related profession where the real wage (after union dues) is less than a similar job without a union. It’s almost guaranteed that union members will negotiate better benefits for their members than you would by yourself bargaining with your employer.

“Right to work” laws are misnamed. You have no right to a job in any state. The closest we came was during the Great Depression. Government-created agencies like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps hired the unemployed to build bridges and improve our national parks when private industry would not. My grandfather was one of these people that depended on a WPA job during the Great Depression. Today, if you are unemployed the best you can hope for are some limited unemployment benefits and food stamps. The reality for most people is that these benefits don’t begin to cover the real cost of living, so they are employed. They are just not employed enough to have a living wage. Many of these people are so good at finding jobs that they have two or three jobs simultaneously, generally part time with no benefits. Yet they still cannot afford to live and they survive at the margins, perhaps in group housing but often they end up homeless.

So right to work states don’t guarantee any right to work. Such laws thus provide no particular incentive to get work. And if you can’t find a job, state assistance at helping you find a job will be marginal at best. Maybe there is a state unemployment office where you can go to look at local job listings, although this is mostly done online now. To the extent you can get unemployment benefits, you will likely have to prove you are diligently searching for a job. This isn’t normally a problem because you cannot survive long on unemployment benefits. At best you will draw from your savings less quickly than you would without them.

What would a right to work look like? A right is distinguished from a privilege because it is inherent and inalienable. You have the right to practice the religion of your choice. If you had a true right to work then either a employer would have to hire you or the government would be the employer of last resort. You might not like the work they would give you but it would be work that you are capable of doing. And since it would be work instead of free labor, they would have to pay you a wage. And since we work to survive, the work would have to pay a living wage, i.e. you should be able to live above the poverty line from a full time job.

You’ll see none of this in any “right to work” state, or any state at all, which means there is no right to work in this country. What they really are is “the right to opt out of paying union dues while enjoying the benefits of a union should your job be covered by a collective bargaining agreement.” Of course if because of insufficient union dues, the union goes bankrupt then you are out of luck. And as is often the case in right to work states, with no requirement for you to pay union dues, most unions can’t organize to win collective bargaining rights. Unsurprisingly “right to work” states have much lower rates of unionized workers than other states.

Without a labor union not only are you likely to have fewer benefits, you are also more likely to lose your job, which contradicts the whole “right to work” philosophy. You are an “at will” employee, which means you can quit for anytime and any reason and leave your employer in the lurch. Your employer also has the right to fire you at any time, and generally for any reason except those few reasons (like due to your sex or race) prohibited by law. Of course, it is very hard to prove that you were deliberately fired due to these factors, so basically you can be let go at any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and with no severance pay unless there is a state law on that. You might be able to retain your health insurance under the COBRA law, only if you can pay the full cost of the premiums while getting no income.

Right to work laws are simply snake oil wherein the state gives you the “right” not to pay union dues at the almost certain cost of a reduced standard of living and with a greater likelihood of sudden unemployment. If it were explained to workers this way almost no employees would want them.

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